April 18, 2010

Google2Twitter Streams Restored After Week's Outage

For those of you who follow the @lgstream Twitter account, fueled by my shares from Google Reader, in addition to Delicious bookmarks and blog posts, the flood slowed to a mere drip over the last week, as the service behind its automation was stopped cold, due in part to its own success. The Reader2Twitter application I first featured back in September, which saw an update in February to support Buzz entries to Twitter as well, exceeded its AppEngine quota and ground to a halt on the 12th, leaving its users high and dry in the meantime. With the newly-called Google2Twitter down for the count, all that hit my @lgstream account were the rare bookmarks and posts from here - making me look more self-centered than usual. As of tonight, however, the stream is back in full, having been reenabled.

When faced with the outage, Google2Twitter's author explained that the once-small application had outgrown its 1GB datastore, and required an upgrade to a paid version of Google's AppEngine. But paying from China, where he lives, is no easy feat. In the meantime, he suggested it could be open sourced at some point, and he was going to work out a way to get the project funded.

After six days of downtime, which stopped my stream, streams of my clients, and many others, the stream was unclogged tonight and data is flowing again. Interestingly enough, the author is hinting at bringing on yet another supported service, Blogger. In a quick tweet tonight, he wrote: "the web interface of Reader2Twitter has been restored. I am going to support blogger2twitter later." On the Blogger platform, this would be of benefit to me, although my routing through TwitterFeed already does a fine job.

I'll be checking in with the app's author to see if this is a one-time blip, and what measures will be taken to avoid problems in the future, but for now, I'm just glad it's back. To see my stream through Twitter, don't forget to be subscribed to @lgstream. I share the best of the tech Web so you don't have to read everything else. You can watch Google2Twitter at @gr2t.